With the angular tailoring and uniquely fractured silhouettes of his first collection, Thomas Tait has the fashion world on high alert

One night last fall, hordes of angsty kids with nose rings and studded boots huddled together on an abandoned street corner in East London. Some wandered into a nearby pub, where craggy construction workers were bellied up to the bar. Others chain-smoked under streetlights for an hour. All were there to support Thomas Tait, a 23-year-old fashion unknown who was about to debut his spring collection at the Wilkinson Gallery, owned by a friend. Tait's first look—a strict square-cut cape over equally angular Bermuda shorts—was worth the wait.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Despite the absence of big-name editors and retailers in his front row, Tait has swiftly become the season's most buzzed-about darling. "So much of the message was only seen if you were at the show," he says. From the front, his silhouettes are the model of the new minimalism: long-sleeve, high-neck tops that resemble dancers' leotards, high-rise cigarette pants, and envelope skirts in nude or monochromatic navy—"like when the sun looks midnight blue after closing your eyes for a bit," Tait says. From other angles, it's a different story. Backs are completely exposed, from the waist all the way to the shoulder blades. A sleeveless tank without sides proves to be little more than a structured bib. And detachable knee-length peplums, which Tait gingerly refers to as "ass cardigans," have the architectural volume of a Richard Serra sculpture. "Each piece offers a fractured view of the body," he says. "I wanted to create intimacy with the clothes by requiring people to actually look at them up close, as opposed to seeing them straight on and flat, like you do on a website."

More From ELLE

Growing up in a suburb of Montreal, Tait was a bit of an odd man out, a fragile thinker among wealthy, "not particularly stylish jocks." A career in fashion was the furthest thing from his mind. "I had this image of a designer as a flamboyant gay man who wears chiffon blouses, and that's certainly not me," he says. In high school, he began to muse on the actual world in front of him and the way he wished it would look. To Tait, clothing seemed like the most obvious way to subvert his quotidian reality. Escaping into images of Alexander McQueen's haunting runway shows and Hussein Chalayan's intellectual concepts, he enrolled in Canada's Collège LaSalle to study fashion design, followed by graduate work at Central Saint Martins in London.

Since his transatlantic arrival two years ago, the Brits have been very good to Tait. Editors and stylists are tripping over one another to shoot his spring collection. And he recently won London's inaugural $40,000 Dorchester Collection Fashion Prize, beating out a short list with more established London favorites such as Louise Goldin and Mary Katrantzou. "Every time I'd be sitting in my studio and the roof would start leaking or a light would burn out, I'd think, `Please, Dorchester, come through,' " says Tait, who plans to put the money toward his fall collection. Unfortunately for his old friends, when the time comes, an entirely different crowd will be sitting front row.